README.md

Simple Search Engine

A simple search engine that uses simple python data structures to store the data and search for it.

Usage

1. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Prepare the data

The data should be free text and in the data folder. Every file in the data folder will be indexed as a document.

3. Run the search engine

To run the script, first cd into the root directory of the project and then run the following command:

export PYTHONPATH=$(pwd)

Then run the following command:

python src/main.py

4. Search for a query

The search engine will ask you to enter a query. Enter the query and press enter. The search engine will return the top 5 results.

How it works

The search engine uses a few simple steps to search for a query:

1. It reads the data from the data folder and stores it in a dictionary.
2. It preprocesses the data by removing stop words, punctuations, numbers and converting the text to lowercase.
3. It reads stopwords from the stopwords.txt file, preprocesses the stopwords and stores them in a list.
4. It reads the query from the user and preprocesses it.
5. It calculates the score of each document for the query and ranks them in descending order. The score is calculated by the number of times the document contains the query words.
6. It returns the top 5 results.